POLITICAL COMMENTARY
Bashing the Unions
By ALAN WATKINS NINETEEN ELEVEN was a great year for strikes. There was conflict in all the major in- dustries; even the seamen stopped wdrk. 'The mass of English strikers,' noted the SPECTATOR of August 19, 1911, 'have no particular grudge against the State; all they want is more and more leisure, and we should be the last to write of such ambitions as wrong or unnatural. They are not so mad as to think that government is the root of all evil. But they have fallen into the hands of leaders—like Mr Tom Mann and Mr Ben Tillet . . .—who tell them that all State intervention and arbitration is bound to end in bitter disappointment, and that the only way is to return to the old practice of strikes.'
-Today Mr Harold Wilson takes a more severe line than the SPECTATOR of 1911. The seamen's *Strike, he says, is 'a strike against 'the" 'State, against the community.' Indeed it is a matter for mild Surprise that he did not bring into his tele- vision broadcast the grave inconvenience, doubt- lesi caused by the strikers to Her MA5Ity the Queen. Certainly there were echoes ji his rohrases of Sir John Simon in 1926, tryingisilo prove that the general strike was treasonable. f course Mr Wilson said that he was not tang sidei; of course he made some sharp. refe-reirces in the employers' introduction of extra weekend duties following the 1965 wage agreement. Never- dieless the dominant impression left at the end of his broadcast was that there were, for Rriesent purposes, two groups of people in BritainI,On . the one hand there were the seamen, in effect out- laws, even though gallant ones. And on the ,Other hand there were the rest of us—you, me, Mr Wil- inn, Her Majesty. Rarely, not even jo his Rhodesia broadcast of last autumn, can the Prime Minister have played the part of pater Ratriae to quite such perfection.
And yet, in order to fill this exalted role, it was not necessary to go as far as the Prime Minister did on Monday. He could have delivered a rather different kind of broadcast He could, first of all, have said that this was not a quarrel between the seamen's union and the Government, but a quarrel between the union and the shipping em-
ployers. Naturally (he could have ai the Government was keeping a sharp eye on the Situation. He could then have gone on to pay a graceful tribute to Mr Ray Gunter,og that the poor fellow rested neither by night nor by day. In the meantime all that we ordeA rl'hls
i could do was keep calm . . . no n panic- measures ... everything under control matter well in hand . . thank you, good night and God bless you all.
This was the type of broadcast that Mr Wilson could have made. But he did not chnose to do this. Instead he elected to deliver whatantounted to an attack on the seamen's union. Father, he slaked the prestige of the Government on a settle- ment of the strike which could only be humiliat- ing to the union. However closely one reads the small print in his broadcast, it is difficult to find any escape clauses for the seamen. There were no new proposals. Mr Wilson, in short, made the Government a party to the dispute at a very early stage. Why did he do this?
One has, of course, to reckon with Mr Wilson's growing love of the dramatic gesture. And a dramatic gesture on television suits him best of all. He is an accomplished performer, and, like all accomplished performers, he relishes an opportunity of displaying his skills. But we must not be too cynical. Mr Wilson is often depicted as a highly cautious, highly political individual. To some extent this is accurate enough: but there is another side to his character. He can be ex- tremely impetuous; no sooner does a bright thought come into his head than he announces it to the world. It is this characteristic, and not any deliberate duplicity on his part, which is the ex- planation of such assorted phenomena as the "projected aid to the supposedly famine-stricken areas of Africa, the about-turn on Rhodesia and the winter emergency committee. One hopes, incidentally, that Mr Roy Jenkins's summer emergency committee turns out to be rather more successful.
But Will the seamen's strike come to resemble the Rhodesian affair? Will Mr Wilson, having 'begun by saying one thing, end up by doing another? Somehow, at the moment, one doubts if For many months there have been signs that the Gnvernment was intent on having a show-
down. puts the unions. (One p it in these crude teoins because, .ia fact, these are the terms in whiCh it has been put by ministers.) Sooner or later—the' argument ran—the Government, like Htinipty-Dumpty, would have to show who was master. It would have to do this, first, because the public expected it and, secondly, because it was necessary in order to prevent the incomes policy from collapsing completely. At one stage it-Was on the cards that an example would be made of the railwaymen: but then, the public has a Certain. affection for railwaymen, and a rail strike can :lie eitremely inconvenient, and any- Way, when the strike was threatened a general election was approaching. It now looks as if the seamen may have stepped into the breach vacated by the NUR.
I do.not for a moment suggest that the Govern- ment provoked the seamen's strike; still less that the Government is at all happy now that it actually has a strike on its hands. There does, however, seem to have been an element of accep- tance, almost of fatalism. Sooner or later, ministers believed, a strike of this nature was bound to take place; better get it over with sooner not later,,-rather like a child catching mumps. To Rut it no higher, Mr Wilson and Mr Gunter did not really go out of their way to avoid the strike. Why, for instance, were the ship- owners not invited to number ten at the same lime as the seamen's union, or indeed at any other timed- There does not seem to be any very con- vincing answer.
gain, Mr Gunter appears to have taken a less 'leder. Otis attitude towards the seamen's claim than did the employers' federation itself. The union, it will be recalled, put forward a claim for a forty-hour week with overtime and an increa,e of 12s. 6d. a month in the basic rate. The shipping federation's final offer, made on April 6, would have given effect to a forty-hour week in three stages and included in the first stage a rise of 12c, 6d. a month for those "(broadly speaking) with over five years'Vrvice. This, so the federa- tion claims, would in practice have amounted to a rise in wages of 5 per cent. But, from what one can gather, this offer was not greatly to the GoVernment's taste. Mr Gunter's proposal was foi4'-an inquiry, coupled with the employers' original offer of 3 per cent. 'The Prime Minister and I,' said Mr Gunter, 'stressed the very serious consequences of the decision to strike and urged the executive to agree to the proposal for a full in- quiry with an immediate increase of 3 per cent.' --' Under the Government's proposals, therefore, all the union could be sure of getting was a rice of 3 per cent. For even if the inquiry recom- meitel'ed an additional rise, there was no guaran- tee that the seamen would receive it. In the House, Mr Norman Atkinson asked the very pertinent qtrion whether any recommendation would be referred to the Prices and Incomes Board. Mr Opfer replied that `I really do not want to het rinfolved in that sort of argument here. There are team', ways of handling a situation like this.'
is hard not to feel some sympathy for the seamen. With some justice, they believe that they akone of the few groups in this country to who.m the incomes policy is being rigorously applied. The incomes policy looks more and more like a series of exceptions, interspersed with the occasional norm. If the policy is to be taken more seriously in futuie, the seamen's claim does not look a particularly good place to begin. It is un- likely to cause a reaction in or be used as a Precedent by other industries. And the seamen can make out at least as good a case as some other groups for being treated as an exception.
The admission that there can be exceptions may in retrospect be seen as the weakness in the in- comes policy as conceived by the Government. For according to Mr George Brown, Mr Wilson and other ministers, the policy is supposed merely to,confine the general level of wages, leaving everyone in substantially the same position as he ocopied previously. (Mr Mann,' said the SPEC- AATOR of August 19, 1911, 'talks as though every workman in the land could and ought to be paid £2 a week, as though that could be a solution of anything. The conditions which guaranteed those wages would also send up the cost of everything purchasable, and the £2 a week in the end would put the worker in no better position than he occu- pies now.') Yet the introduction of exceptions makes the policy re-distributive: some people .paust receive relatively more than others. More- oier, such re-distribution as has already occurred has been in an upward rather than a downward direction. The people who have done really well Late been MPs, judges and doctors. The policy has been the reverse of a socialist wages policy. Or so, at least, it must seem to the seamen. `Harold,' said one Conservative this week, 'has stolen the Tory clothes on Rhodesia and on the common Market He's now in process of stealing Ann on the trade unions.' .It is a view which Many Labour members are coming increasingly .to accept.
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